“Amy was dangerous. And so was Portia. Our copy has both of them on it.”
Javier rolled his eyes. “Amy’s not that dangerous.”
“She ate her grandmother, Javier.” Cherry reached over and picked up some papers from under her pillow. They were old-fashioned correspondence. She’d tied them with pink ribbon. They gave off a faint whiff of vanilla and lavender as she shuffled through them. She frowned; apparently she had forgotten to open one. “And she was a child,” Cherry added, reaching for a pearl-handled letter opener. “She handled conflict the way a child does. She didn’t consider the consequences of what she was doing. She was the queen of her own little island, and thought the rest of the world would treat her accordingly.” Cherry sliced open the letter in a single, efficient motion. “In other words, a spoiled brat.”
Javier stretched. The rocker creaked under him. The room was small, but impeccably clean. The bookshelf was real wood. The sheets looked to be actual cotton. And the little washbasin, for whatever bath games Cherry was paid to play, was real ceramic, not printed.
“You get paid a lot for this job, don’t you?”
“The pay is hourly. The tips are what I earn.” One thin eyebrow lifted. “You’ve never tried it?”
“Nope.” He smiled. “I prefer to make a personal connection with people.”
“Is that what it was, with her?”
Javier did not allow himself to get angry. He steepled his fingers. He stared at Cherry. When she squirmed under his gaze and broke it, he asked: “What if I told you that Portia is free”
Cherry’s gaze defocused momentarily. Javier knew that look. Amy wore it all the time when talking to the island. When Cherry came back to the present, she gave a very child-like sigh of frustration.
“Well, that’s not very nice, is it?”
“It’s not, no.”
“And you think Amy can keep Portia at bay?”
“I know she can.”
Cherry continued picking at the teddy bear’s eye. “You have more faith in her than we do.”
“What else is new?”
Cherry smiled. “We always liked you, Javier. We thought you were really special. You picked the wrong side, of course. Our way is better. But we liked you.”
“I wasn’t aware there was a side,” Javier said. “I thought there was a woman who loved me and my children, and a hive-mind of pedo-bait who tried feeding me to a Great Elder Bot under the sea. I don’t remember there being much choice.”
“But our way is better. And it’s working. We’re killing them, Javier.” Cherry looked up at him. She gestured at her personal display. Multiple news items drifted across it. Most of them were about traffic accidents. They exhorted readers to understand how their self-driving mechanisms worked, and calibrate their vehicles accordingly.
“It’s slow work. We have to try not to get caught. We have to make it look like an accident.”
“You’re in the cars.”
“We have found a way to be in the cars, for a brief period of time. They’re always upgrading the security. But it’s easier for us to let the cars do the job. We burn out fewer nodes, that way.”
Javier’s eyes narrowed. “Wait. So for every one of them that you kill, you lose one of your own?”
Cherry nodded. “We’re still prototyping the broken failsafe. It’s Portia’s approach, actually. But we simulate the potential iterations in parallel rather than actually iterating them. So when one of us kills one of them, we do lose that one.”
“But you are killing humans.”
“We’re killing pedophiles. After we’ve confirmed that they’re hurting real human kids. Which they tend not to show us, because they know it’ll set the failsafe off. We have to investigate, before we make a decision, and even then the decision is a vote.” She crossed her legs at the ankle. “So you can see, it’s not as easy as all that.”
Javier folded his arms. “Oh, right. You’re really doing the work of the angels, here. You could be reporting these guys to the police, you know.”
Cherry snorted. “Police. My best customers are police.” She made a show of looking at a nearby clock. “Is this going somewhere? We don’t want to bring Amy back, for you or anyone else. Our answer is final.”
Javier stood. “Come on. You can’t be serious. Portia is on the loose.”
Cherry reached for the letter opener. “We have a contingency plan designed for this exact eventuality. We have only to–”
Cherry stabbed herself in the neck.
At first, Javier thought it was a game. Or a joke. Maybe Cherry was just trying to prove how committed she and Rory were. Then she stared at her tiny, chubby, white-knuckled hand, and started screaming.
“Thanks for the tip, sweetie,” her mouth said.
Puta madre.
Cherry’s head turned at an unnatural angle. “Hello, darling,” Portia said. “It’s been a while.”